What Are AI Agents? And Why East African Businesses Should Care
A customer places an order for 50 bags of cement, needed by tomorrow. In most businesses, a person now checks stock, writes up an invoice, books a truck, updates the CRM, and fires off a confirmation email. That's five separate steps, five separate chances for delay. Now imagine a system that does all five itself, checking inventory, reserving stock, generating the invoice, arranging transport, and sending the confirmation, without a human touching a single one of those steps. That's not a chatbot. It's an AI agent, and Gartner expects 40% of enterprise applications to include one by the end of 2026 , up from under 5% just a year earlier. It may be one of the biggest shifts in business technology since the arrival of cloud computing, and East African businesses have a genuine chance to adopt it early rather than catch up later. AI Agents vs. Chatbots: What's the Difference? Traditional software follows fixed rules: if X happens, do Y. A chatbot goes a step further a...
